TL;DR
The progressive displacement of older forms of coercive violence and control by a seemingly softer and more benign, but no less intrusive form of governance which he called ”biopower”.
In the modern world, biological life has become deeply intertwined with modern systems of power. Historically, power has been associated with punishment and physical force, while modern states increasingly maintain control by regulating and managing life itself.
Aspects like health, fertility, mortality, sexuality, and medicine are no longer solely personal matters, but political ones connected to the organization of society.
The state seeks power through the ability to manage populations, while capitalism seeks to benefit from disciplined, controllable bodies capable of labor and consumption.
Foucault’s concept of biopower helps analyze the mechanisms through which this form of control occurs, and a Marxist analysis helps explain why these systems become increasingly expansive and invasive under capitalism.
As capitalism expands, and contradictions appear, the regulation of biological life becomes increasingly important to maintaining both economic production and social order. In capitalist modernity, the human body itself becomes a political and economic object of control.
Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” - The History of Sexuality, Foucault
- On one hand, state institutions discipline individual bodies into becoming obedient, productive, and controllable: schools, prisons, hospitals, military
- On the other hand, governments regulate populations through: census data, fertility rates, medicine, policies surrounding birth and death.
Through these institutions, biological life becomes increasingly structured, monitored, and managed. Allowing the state, which seeks power, to gain legitimate social control over society.
Capitalism cannot remain static because it depends upon continuous expansion and the constant revolutionizing of production in order to keep generating profit. Eventually, this expansion reaches beyond geography and markets and extends into biological life itself.
Through biopolitics, the state exerts power over populations in ways that discipline individuals into becoming economically useful.
Because of this, decisions about healthcare, prisons, reproduction, public health, and mortality are guided by state institutions not primarily for the benefit of society, but ultimately for the preservation of capitalism. The human body itself becomes both a political and economic object of control.
Incidentally, a global abortion industry that disproportionately targets the poor is possibly the most succinct contemporary example of Foucauldian biopower.